


Where My Heart Was Buried

by TheMagicPocketTurtle



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 19:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16625096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMagicPocketTurtle/pseuds/TheMagicPocketTurtle
Summary: Baba Yo is approached by a grieving mother seeking aid in her child's resurrection. It reminds her of a time she also wanted to bring someone back.A story about two of my dragons.





	Where My Heart Was Buried

**Author's Note:**

> This is fanfic only by virtue of the fact that I don't technically own the concept of a Bogsneak, Skydancer or Tundra. Everything else is pretty original, this is mostly here for backup.

“Nothing ever dies in the Labyrinth.” Smoke billowed from her mouth as she spoke, her mask cocked at an angle so she could draw on her pipe in between sentences. “ _She_ would never allow it. There is no room for death in Her world.”

The words were hollow. And they were not the words Mim had travelled all this way to hear. She had been told that Baba Yo was the one to speak to, after a long train of witches and necromancers who shook their heads and insisted they couldn’t give her what she wanted. And now, she stood before the witch, her daughter’s skull in her hands, only to listen to Baba Yo spit the same unsatisfying lies her family had. There was no death, not when a few days of her daughter’s promised lifespan had been transferred to the dragon that had half-devoured her and vanished into the night, not when her memory lived on, not when this, not if that.. They were all pretty platitudes tip-toeing around the ugly truth- her child was dead. She held their skull in her hands.

“I just want her back.” She said.

Baba Yo shifted. Until now, she had reclined on a mess of pillows in front of a guttering fire pit. A comfortable looking nest, if far too large for one person. Taking a staff, she rose to her feet, the pipe still clenched between her teeth, and gestured for Mim to rise. Heaving herself around like a boulder, she began to circle, inspecting her.

She was much smaller than her stories- Mim stood head and shoulders above the witch, though she had a noticeable stoop to her shoulders (The headdress may have added a few inches to her height. Perhaps it balanced out.). Short and squat and crooked, Baba Yo was not beautiful. Even with the smooth, painted mask hiding her facial features, she was ugly, like a warped, gnomic mockery of a dragon. Ugly, but not so much as the stories would have you believe either.

“What will you pay me?”

“Anything.”

“How did she die?”

“She was-” Mim had to swallow. It never got any easier to say, and she’d said it a hundred times by now. “- She was, um. She was eaten. By a wildclaw, almost two- two years ago.”

“I did not ask you when.” Circling back around to face Mim, Baba delicately took the skull from her hands, and turned it over. Mim had been very careful with the bones- she did not know how well they needed to keep, so she had refused to allow them to be buried or burned. Instead, when she began to realize that finding someone to raise her child from the dead would take longer than her flesh would hold out, Mim had gently sloughed off what was left herself, until all she had left to carry were these raw, off-color bones that she’d rolled into a padded sheet for safety. She counted them daily, making sure no tarsal or vertebrae had gone missing.

Baba Yo tore out three teeth from the skull- two from the back, and one of the fangs. Mim could not stop herself from screeching, but Baba did not flinch. “Hush. Those who profit from a service should be the ones to pay for it.” The teeth were spirited away into some pocket or sleeve, and Baba hefted her staff. “Follow me.” she grunted, and hobbled out the door.

* * *

  _She had been young once. And she was no more beautiful then than she would be forty years later._

_Then, now, she was not yet the Bog Witch, she was not even Baba yet- she was just Yo. She was just another stooped, crooked bogsneak settled into the mire between the Gladeveins and the Shrieking Wild. She hadn’t been there long- she had only just carved her section of the bog out from the existing territories. Fiercely fought for, fiercely gained, she would remember, often when nursing her mauled cheek or shredded leg, what her mother had told her before she had set out into the world  - “You are small, Yo. Too small to afford mercy, and no one out there will give it to you.” Sentiments that had proven true, so far._

_Being undergrown, she seemed an easy target for both the territorially greedy and the territorially new- she’d been scarred and scored twenty times over before it was decided her little plot of bogwater and rotting trees wasn’t worth the effort._

_Still, she took to hanging the bone charms along the edges. They didn’t do anything yet. They were just warnings made from the torn limbs and tails of would-be land thieves. A reminder that anyone’s insides could be put up for decoration. The fact that the denizens of the Labyrinth were naturally superstitious helped. They stayed away._

_The woods were never quiet. Neither was the bog. Especially in the summer, when it was hot and humid and filled with the screaming of frogs and insects. After a while, you learned to love it, or you tuned it out. Or both, really, so Yo couldn’t be certain when that new, particular screaming first started. It wasn’t frequent, or even consistent, but it was piercing and furious for what little time it spent occurring. At first, she dismissed it as some unique, dying prey animal. Also not uncommon. But about the fifth or seventh time it happened, she decided that nothing should die that many times and get away with it._

_She was no tracker. It took her several weeks of dropping everything to go tearing after that bodiless, unpredictable sound out in the trees and the mud. She told herself it was some sort of animal, maybe its mating cry. Then, she told herself it was some sort of monster. After that, it must be a spirit, after that, it must be a demon, after that, after that, after that-_

_Well, after that, finding it to be only a woman, screeching and wildly beating at trees and rocks with a stick was rather disappointing._

_She sulked in the shadows, mentally comparing the woman’s frustrated screams to her own memory of sounds. She didn’t want this to be the answer, but she was not one to indulge in delusions, and so, with a heavy heart, she concluded that she had wasted her time._

_Hefting her staff (The second or third, in what would be a long line of gnarled walking-sticks), she shuffled out of the scrubs and waved her arms at the intruder. “Ayeh! You! Git out of here!”_

_The woman screamed again, quite unlike she had previously, freezing in place as Yo approached her. All things considered, it was not the most ideal of meetings. All things considered, it worked well enough._

* * *

Baba Yo’s movements were painfully slow. Mim realized, after several minutes of walking, that she was hiding a limp. She chose not to comment on it- after all, she’d been told that soliciting Baba Yo’s help was not the hard part. Keeping it was. 

The witch shuffled slowly along, stopping periodically to grab a fistfull of dirt, shake her head, and let it drop to the ground before starting on again. It was two hours, or better, before she finally shoved a fistful of dark, black earth into her mouth, chewed it thoughtfully, then spit it out again. They were only about a ten minute walk from her hut.

“Here.” she grunted, rapping her staff against the ground with a muffled thump. “Start digging here.”

Carefully, Mim lay down the roll. “With what?”

Baba Yo scoffed. “With your hands. Get a stick, use your child’s leg bone, I don’t much care. Just dig.”

“How big does it need to be?”

“I’ll tell you when to stop.”

Awkwardly, Mim cleared away some of the leaves and twigs, glancing over to Baba Yo, who had seated herself comfortably on a rock, as if doing so would cause a shovel to appear. A shovel did not appear. So she dug with her hands.

They weren’t made for digging- skydancer claws were thin and brittle, made more for snatching insects than for moving earth. Her daughter was made for digging. Her mate, who had gifted their child not just his eyes and hide but his breed, could have done this better than she. Tundra had thick, hardy claws, claws that didn’t snap painfully against stones and roots. But they weren’t here, so she did it herself.

She wondered if he could even remember her now. If she’d finally drifted into the ever-encroaching Forget that plagued all Tundra. Not that they’d call it a plague- she’d lived with them long enough to know they would insist that the Forgetting was actually a gift. Sometimes she believed them. What a gift, to know for certain that one day, you would’nt be haunted by the memory of your daughter’s glazed eyes, of the wet sound of her tearing flesh, of the empathetic tingle of satisfaction from the one devouring her.

It wasn’t fair, being the only one who couldn’t forget. It wasn’t fair, watching the memory of your only child fade from your family’s eyes. She couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t _stand_ it.

When the tips of her fingers started bleeding, she decided she needed to stop and rethink her strategy. Baba Yo was still meditating, little rings of smoke floating up from her pipe. Mim wondered, for a moment, if she had refilled it- she couldn’t be sucking on the same tobacco and spice as this morning, could she? Just because she hadn’t noticed her move didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Mim abandoned the hole in search of a digging tool. Baba Yo had suggested her daughter’s shin, or a stick, but instead, she found a sharp, pointed rock. This, she decided, would be perfect- she could use it to hack away at the roots that dogged her efforts. After that, the digging went much easier.

Her arms were sore, and the hole just deep and wide enough to lay down in, when Baba Yo finally rose from her seat. “Out.”

Mim more rolled than climbed out as Baba Yo clicked and measured the ditch with her staff. “Eh. It will do.” She gestured Mim over as she climbed out again. “Now lay out the bones.”

Swaying dangerously, Mim rose to her feet and tottered over to the roll. She unfurled it in the ditch, to which Baba Yo clucked “Lay them out properly. Skull to toe, all of it.”

Mim obeyed. In rolling up the bones, she’d had to sacrifice order for convenience and safety, but she was certain she could remember how they went. She set the skull carefully to one end (The missing teeth still irked her, but she had to admit, the price was small.), and the ribs just a little below that. From there, she could set out the rest of them, the spine, the hips, the arms-

She felt something hard collide with her skull- not hard enough to knock her out, but enough to cause her to stagger, slamming her palms into the dirt and scattering some of the vertebrae.

“That is a leg bone.”

Mim gritted her teeth. Her eyes were watering as she carefully felt the lump. Her fingers came away clean, at least- no blood. With a deep breath, she said shakily “I didn’t know.”

“If you do not know, then you ask. Do not assume. Unless, of course, you want your child with legs for arms and hands for feet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologize to _me_.”

She returned to the skeleton, only now, she hesitated over each bone, glancing over her shoulder as she placed them, waiting for the stick to come crashing down again. With an impatient sigh, Baba Yo hunkered down next to her. “Put it here.” she pointed.

And so it continued. Mim would select a bone, and Baba Yo would point to its place in the ditch. “How do you know so much about tundra skeletons?” She asked, more to fill the silence than to find an answer.

Baba Yo only grunted. “I’ve done this before.”

* * *

_“I wanted to apologize.”_

_Yo sized her up. She was not a large dragon, but still larger than Baba’s stunted form. She didn’t stand like a hunter or a fighter, though that didn’t necessarily mean she was neither. She smiled, nervously, and Yo could see the long canines in her mouth. Those could be trouble, if she went for the throat or the belly or anywhere else that wasn’t yet knotted and toughened with scars. Yes. Quite a great deal of trouble._

_“I uh, I wasn’t trying to, trying to trespass. I just. I come out here to- to vent, I guess, I um. I didn’t think anyone could hear me this far out.”_

_Yo said nothing._

_She held out a cloth-covered basket- Yo couldn’t be certain of the contents. Spiders, probably. The biting kind. “I made some. Some sweetgrass knots?”_

_Yo cocked her head. If she was unsure of the contents of her own basket then they were almost assuredly biting spiders._

_She pulled back the cloth, took a hesitant step forward, and set it on the ground. She then backed up two steps and grabbed her elbow, twisting awkwardly at the fur-tufts there. Yo leerily approached the basket._

_They certainly looked like grass knots. But she’d been deceived by peace before. “Poison.” she grunted._

_“N-no, no, I promise they’re not.”_

_Yo snatched up the basket, and held it back out to the stranger. “Eat one.”_

_Hesitantly, she reached for a knot. Yo immediately slapped her hand away. “Not that one.” She dug one out from the back. “This one.”_

_Yo watched intently as she took a bite from it. At any moment, there should have been a gasp, a choke, the bubble of spit and vomit as she rejected whatever toxins she thought she could trick Yo into ingesting. But by the end of the knot, there was nothing. The stranger just stood there, nervously staring and tugging at her fur._

_Carefully, suspiciously, still unconvinced of her safety in the matter, she took one of the knots and bit into it. It was crispy, the sweetgrass carefully dried into its position and flavored with lemons. No jokes. No tricks. Just grass and lemon and a basket._

_Yo felt almost foolish now. All that fuss and suspicion, wasted where it wasn’t needed. Unless there was only one poisoned knot. That was always a possibility. But, for a moment, she didn’t want it to be._

_“This is… good.” she said after a moment. A relieved smile broke over the stranger’s face._

_“I’m so glad.”_

_Yo grunted. The two stood there, in awkward silence, for a little while more. “You can… scream here. If you want. I grant permission.”_

_The stranger politely bowed her head. “Thank you.”_

* * *

Mim pushed the last of the dirt back into the hole. Her arms and back and, well, really everything, were sore and aching. She wanted to curl up and rest here on the ground, but she forced herself to stay standing, or at least kneeling, until Baba Yo had finished inspecting the plot.

“Good, good.” She said finally, nodding and tapping the soft dirt with her staff- she’d insisted against compacting it. “We’re done now.”

“Done?”

“Done.” Baba Yo nodded. She turned and started to shuffle away.

Mim looked at the shallow, loosely filled grave. Then she looked at the back of Baba Yo. With a shaky, tired voice, she said “I did not- _we_ did not come here for a funeral.”

“I know.”

“Then how-” and here, she could not stop herself from snapping, “- are we done here? We have done nothing but dig and fill a grave, if I wanted-”

Baba Yo rounded back on her, and her protests ground to a halt. Baba poked her with the staff, roughly, in the center of her chest and she stumbled back. “Did your hatchling take a day to make the first time?”

Mim did not answer, and just stood frozen.

Baba shoved her with the stick again. “Did you hear me?”

“I, um, no, I mean, yes, I heard you, but-”

“Was your hatchling incubated in a day or not?”

“No.”

“Then what-” and here she poked Mim again. “Makes you think it will take a day this time?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

“No you don’t. We are done _now_.” she turned again. “Let her rest a while. I must speak to my wife.”

* * *

Mim hadn’t met Mookie when she first came to the bog- those who directed her there had suggested she try and talk to her first, rather than directly with Baba Yo, but impatience had simply gotten the better of her.

What they hadn’t warned her of was how odd Mookie herself was. There was a distinct rustling as she moved, like wind through grass- and so, it seemed, her ‘fur’ was, upon closer inspection. Fine grass, soft and thick. Mim couldn’t quite tell what was below it- she found herself uncertain she wanted to know.

Mookie had tutted at her cracked fingers and broken claws, then brought a bowl of warm water and gently washed the grime and blood away. The water turned black with dirt- too much dirt, if you asked Mim, for her small hands. When that was done she tossed the murky water out the window, and refilled the bowl, crushing salt into it and stirring to dissolve. “Let them soak awhile.” she said, gently placing Mim’s hands back into the water. It was surprisingly soothing, if tingly. She let her shoulders relax.

Baba Yo slumped impatiently at the table, rapping her claws against the wood. While she’d put up no formal resistance to Mookie’s hospitable fussing, she hadn’t offered to help either, and instead glowered out at both of them from behind her mask.

As Mim let her fingers soak, Mookie turned away and kissed her wife, almost apologetically, on the forehead. Baba grunted, then took her hand and led her to a back room. Mim closed her eyes and leaned back, hands still in the bowl. She couldn’t hear exactly what they were talking about, but she could make out Baba Yo’s distinct growl and the measured softness of Mookie’s voice. She was half asleep when they returned.

They said nothing at first, but then she heard a soft smack, like someone had slapped away the hand of a child. “Let her sleep.”

Baba grunted. Mim continued to feign sleep, suddenly keenly aware of her breathing. She heard the soft tapping of Baba’s staff, and the door creak open. Mookie was gone again the next morning.

* * *

  _“What are these?” Mookie reached out and tapped one of the bone warnings hanging from the branches. They clacked gently against each other as they swayed. “I keep meaning to ask.”_

_“Warnings. They keep the rabble out.”_

_“What do they mean?”_

_“They mean ‘keep out.’”_

_“Is that it?”_

_“What else are they supposed to mean?” Yo irritably crossed her arms._

_“My father says they’re curses. That anyone who touches them starts growing warts and tumors.” She tapped one again, and grinned at Yo. Yo looked away._

_“Your father is an idiot.” she said._

_Bones were not difficult to come by in the Labyrinth. There was a not-unwarranted stereotype for the denizens of the Wilds to be messy eaters. If you didn’t want to tear the bones from the living yourself, someone else had already done it for you, and left them lying about. All you had to do was look for them._

_Tibia, fibia, skull- all good bones, but Baba Yo had always kept a special fondness for the ribcage. She’d always found it sent a very particular message. Skulls were overused, having lost much of their intimidation by sheer desensitization. Everyone had a skull these days. Arms and legs were too easily faked and too generic in their shape to be particularly frightening, and she’d learned the hard way that hanging pelvises sent a far more vulgar message than the one she’d intended. But the ribcage? That always seemed to give people pause. Particularly if you broke out the bars first. They also made for lovely garden cages- Mookie was showing her how to grow tomatoes in them._

_Yo knew only a little magic. It was not a skill that came as naturally to the Bogsneak race as to others. “We have no gifts from the gods, child. They neither made us, nor blessed us. Learn to use your claws.” Or so her mother said. So that’s what she did. Bones were hard, but she was sharp, and she forced her claws into them until she felt her own skeleton shudder._

_The first few marks weren’t really runes. They had no meaning, no purpose. But they looked interesting, and they provided a sense of empty mystique to an otherwise bland bit of bone. It was no more beautiful than she was, but it was interesting, and she gave it to Mookie._

_“What does it mean?” She’d asked, eyes wide and voice hitching in excitement as she turned it over in her hands._

_Yo didn’t have a good answer for that. “I, hm.” She found herself biting one of her claws._

_After several moments of silence, Mookie put her arms around Yo and squeezed. “I love it, thank you.”_

_Face buried in Mookie’s shoulder (she smelled like mint), Yo swore the next one would mean something._

* * *

Sleeping was hard. Instinctively, Mim would curl around the sackroll that had housed her daughter’s bones for two years. Sometimes it helped, if she was tired enough. Most times, she found herself listlessly walking through the trees, only to curl up by the plot of turned earth. She was guaranteed to sleep then, but it always left her with a sore back, bug bites, and no more rest than she’d had when she dropped.

Baba Yo offered no explanation for Mookie’s disappearance, and when pressed, shrugged Mim off with an irritated wave of her hand and a growl. After three days of waiting, Mim started to clean. It was more to keep her hands busy than anything else. Two years of wandering had made her accustomed to _doing_ . It would take more than a few days of rest to truly settle into idleness. Baba Yo didn’t seem to mind, or if she did, it was too small a bother to do more than grunt and huff about. She’d waddle out of the room whenever Mim started talking, and after a while Mim realized that Baba Yo wasn’t so much avoiding _her_ as avoiding conversation.

It was a quiet few weeks.

Then Mookie came back.

Her return was announced with a panicked, half-strangled scream.

The screamer was dragged into Baba Yo’s hut, half disabled by Mookie’s vice grip on the looser parts of their neck-skin. “I’m home!” she shouted cheerily as she shook the dragon, choking out his sounds for a few brief moments. “Inside voice. We’re _inside_ now.” she hissed.

This did not calm them.

Mim found herself unable to move from the doorway. She stood rigid and Baba Yo pushed past her and limped over to inspect their new ‘guest’. It was a wildclaw. It was _that_ wildclaw. There was no mistaking him, with his orange feathers and distinctive scar over their left cheek. She couldn’t move. Just like last time, she couldn’t move.

Baba Yo hit him with her staff, and that shut him up. He continued to glance wildly around the room as Baba Yo turned back to Mim. “Look familiar?”

“I... he…” she had to stop and swallow. Collect her thoughts. “Yes. That’s the dragon that killed my daughter.”

“And ate her.”

“Yes.” She had to close her eyes. She found herself leaning heavily on the doorframe.

Meanwhile, Mookie was beaming. “Thought I lost him there for a bit- you know it’s been so long, she’s so faint. But she’s there.”

“They’re always there. You were there much longer than she.”

“Took a bite out of me too. Weren’t he surprised?”

“What?” It came out more as a squawk than a word. “Let me see.”

“You know it’s fine.”

“Let me see!”

Mookie held out her arm, dragging the wildclaw up by the neck as if he weighed nothing, and pointed to somewhere around her forearm. Mim wasn’t looking close enough to see the wound, eyes still focused on Him. Baba Yo made some annoyed, grunting noises while Mookie struggled to contain a giggle. It must not have been a grievous wound, but Baba still fussed as if it were.

She thwacked the offending dragon in the stomach with her staff. As he gasped and squawked, Mim finally managed to shake out “Why… is he here?”

Baba turned to look at her. “You still want your daughter back, yes?”

* * *

_Mookie had stopped visiting._

_She wished she could say she thought nothing of it. Mookie wouldn’t have thought anything of it, Mookie wouldn’t have immediately jumped to mean, nasty conclusions, but then again, she was not Mookie. She was just Yo. And Yo was a mean, nasty thing which is why on the eighth day of fruitless, Mookie-less waiting, she marched into the village like a furious tumbleweed._

_She’d never been to the village. That was one of the unspoken agreements, and Mookie never asked Yo to come to her. Villages were too noisy, too crowded, too full of people elbowing into each other’s space, and just the edge of it had Yo clenching her jaw so tightly she thought she felt a back molar crunch. She tried to loosen it. She failed._

_It was only early afternoon, and as such, there were numerous dragons flocking about- herding hatchlings, gossiping, arguing and haggling over the price of goats and pumpkins. Most of them were Tundra, but there were a handful of others- small breeds. Nothing so fearsome as a ridgeback, or regal as an imperial. Mirrors. A spiral. But they were all looking at her as she passed, some moving quickly along, some following her as she went. She started counting them. Tundra weren’t much to worry about, so long as you got them from behind or below. And spirals were nothing, spirals were as likely to sleep on you as fight you, but mirrors could get tricky. Mirrors always came in gangs, and they didn’t like to lose. There was no winning a fight against Mirrors. There was only surviving it._

_Some of the Tundra looked like Mookie though, enough that she had to stop and do a double take multiple times. But that one was too small, that one didn’t have the right markings, that one was too light, too dark, too thin, that one was missing a leg and had been for some time, that one had a maimed wing._

_Eventually, she just stopped. And waited._

_The one to approach her wasn’t Mookie. He was a large tundra though, built like a lion, with one overlong canine that hung over his lip. Hunched up on her hind legs, she was just under eye level with his shoulder.  He approached her slowly, shaking his mane as though to emphasize his size. Mookie clenched her jaw tighter. She definitely felt a molar crunch._

_“Who are you?” They asked._

_“Yo.” Compared to the velvet of the tundra’s voice, her own sounded like stones rattled in a bag._

_The tundra cocked his head. “Is that a name?”_

_“It is my name.”_

_He shook his mane again. Yo was certain now it was meant to be threatening. “And what brings you here, Yo?”_

_“Mookie.”_

_There was a pause. Yo could feel the villagers watching them from the corners of their eyes- curious, but unwilling to admit it. The immediate area seemed to go quiet. She took a deep breath and readied herself._

_The tundra hummed to himself, then slowly turned away. “Follow me.”_

_So she did._

_He lead her out of the village. Away from witnesses, Yo thought, but she followed anyway. The village was small, mostly underground, Mookie had said, but there were still doors and the occasional window lumping up into view._

_It was not uncommon for Nature clans to curate a garden- true, the Labyrinth was an Eden of bounty, and food was hardly scarce, but there was less competition for what you grew yourself. Here, at the edge of the village, was a vast orchard. Bananas and chestnuts and golden apples weighed the branches down, but the further they walked, the smaller the trees became._

_At the farthest end of the orchard, there were saplings. Newly planted, by the mound of earth around each of their roots._

_“Here she is.” the tundra said, placing a fond paw on the trunk of the second to the left._

_Yo glanced skeptically around and crossed her arms. “Where?”_

_Then the tundra smiled at her. It was an impatient, pitying smile she was all too familiar with, the same sort of smile the ‘nicer’ interlopers gave when they thought she would be an easy kill for territory. “Here.”_

_It took her a while, as she groped through her own denial to reach the conclusion. “You… turned her into a tree?”_

_“Mm, something like that.” The tundra sat, still gazing fondly at the sapling as he did. “My daughter’s previous self, her earlier form, if you will, is buried somewhere in these roots. As time passes, her life will become the life of this tree, and there will be no difference. So, if you like, then yes. We have made Mookie into a tree.”_

_Again, Yo struggled to comprehend. “She’s… dead.”_

_At this, the tundra laughed condescendingly. “There is no such thing as death. We’ve just transplanted her Life elsewhere. It’s not the same thing.”_

_It was. Yo was certain it was. She could feel her breaths growing shallow, and her throat growing hot. “You murdered her? For a tree?”_

_The tundra looked at her sternly, and spoke as if explaining to a child. “This was not murder. She is not dead. Life cannot be so easily extinguished as one might think, it is merely transplanted. Changed.” He waited for a response. When none came, he sighed. “Perhaps it is too complex for your sort to understand.”_

* * *

They had to drag him to her grave. Sometimes, between the gasps, the deliberate tripping and the incoherent screaming, he’d say something that almost sounded like begging. Mim chose not to listen, pinning her eyes to the back of Baba Yo’s head. She clasped her hands together, white knuckles screaming from compression. She could hardly breathe.

Mookie dragged him over the soft dirt. By now he was just panting, eyeing his captors warily. Baba Yo drew a knife, and he began to scream again.

_“You can’t do this!”_

“Take this.” Baba Yo shoved the knife handle-first into Mim’s palm, and went to help her wife pin their newly invigorated prisoner to the ground. Dirt and leaves began flying as his tail struck out, and for the first time, in a detached, unsurprised way, Mim realized that someone, Mookie most likely, had very recently torn out his toe-claws.

“What… what am I-”

“What do you think you do with a knife?!”

She couldn’t say she didn’t want to. She felt like she should, for appearances, for posterity, for the good of her soul or her conscience. Mim gripped the hilt and stared. “I c-... I can’t.”

“You’d better!” Baba Yo snapped.

“This is the only way about it. All that’s left of her is in here.” Mookie said, her voice soft and soothing, like she was talking to a child. “You just need to take her back.”

The wildclaw screamed. _“What the fuck are you talking about?”_

“You can have your daughter, or you can have clean hands. Pick one.” Baba Yo growled.

It wasn’t a choice. Not really. His blood was warm.

* * *

_There is no death in the Labyrinth._ She _would never allow it._  

_It can only change hands, stolen or pawned but never truly destroyed. The life of the plant absorbed by the life of the goat, the life of the goat absorbed by the life of the wolf, and the life of the wolf leeched into the ground, where it was absorbed by the life of the plant. Cyclical. Balanced._

_That was at least what the old goat of a Tundra had said, and that was what Yo clung to as she tore the sapling from its roots and hurled it as far as she could into the reeds. She dug up the grass and weeds, and anything else daring to grow in Her grave. Life could be transferred, but only if there were something to transfer it to. If she killed everything that tried, perhaps she could buy herself time._

_Of course, you couldn’t destroy a nascent orchard without drawing attention. And no green-eyed worshipper of the woodland was going to let such an affront pass uncontested. The first few were strangers, alarmed and concerned gardeners who thought she’d be scared off by their sudden appearance. They left alive, though they missed a few ounces of flesh or inches of skin behind as they did._

_The next day, a new tree had been planted. But the new tree was not alone._

_“You need to leave.” Her father said._

_In response, Yo began to tug and pull at another one of the saplings. She didn’t know who had died to make this one, but she was sure they’d appreciate whacking the old goat upside the head just as much as she would._

_“Stop!” He sounded like someone used to being listened to. When she felt his paw on her shoulder, she spun around. Her claws were already out, and they were already deep in his belly when she registered just what was happening._

_Well. Just because she hadn’t meant to start didn’t mean she had to stop._

_Mookie’s father only looked like a warrior. He was heavy, and strong, but it was the strength of a farmer, not a killer. Yo was small. Her mother had always said she was small, and so far, she hadn’t met anyone who’d proven her mother wrong- but she’d met plenty who never took full advantage of that._

_Yo dove down, under the farmer’s belly. It was a dangerous maneuver, sure, but only if they were expecting it. And no one ever did. Her claws shot up and dug deep under his ribs, and she dragged them down to his hips as she scampered out from under him. It took only moments. He was gutted long before he started screaming, and fell heavily seconds after she’d escaped him._

_She stood a few moments, breathing heavily, watching. Satisfied he was dying, she turned her attention back to Mookie’s new tree- the would-be new ‘Mookie’._

_It was easier to root out than the last- too freshly planted to have started clinging to the ground, soil still too unsettled to weigh it down. Again, she hurled it off into the reeds, then returned to the sapling she’d started to uproot before. She wasn’t sure if it was a kindness, or a sincere pettiness. Either way, she preferred to finish what she started._

_This one was rooted in, and refused to come up easily. Stubbornly, she wrestled with it, until she felt something sharp and wet clamp down on her leg._

_Yo screamed. She heard something snap, and felt something crunch, and her knee buckled. She hit the ground half-blind, choking on her breaths. Stupidly, she tried to scramble to her feet, only to scream again as her leg twisted cruelly under her. She heard a soft, gurgling chuckle, that turned into painful hacking, until Mookie’s father finally lay still. She also lay still._

_Time gets strange, when you’re in pain. Even seconds stretch long and thin, so Yo couldn’t tell you how long she lay there, just trying to catch her breath, her thoughts, anything through the silent screaming in her leg. Eventually, she pulled herself up on her two good arms and one good leg, the one Mookie’s father had crushed with his teeth dragging awkwardly behind her. She grit her teeth and forced herself to crawl back to Mookie’s grave._

_It was only then, as the ringing subsided and she assembled herself, with the smell of blood and organs hanging heavily in the air, that she started to think._

_Yo was born to the wrong breed and under the wrong goddess for such a project. At least, that’s what she would have been told, had she bothered to ask for help. Fortunately, there is no birthright to stubbornness. And every god, no matter how aloof, has always favored the boneheaded above the faithful._

* * *

They hid the body before Gayla finished crawling out of the earth. It hadn’t been hard- Baba Yo’s flock of caimen had been more than happy to loan their teeth and guts to the job as she clucked and cooed over them like a mother.

She didn’t look like Mim’s daughter- not really. At first, Mim had thought her fur was just caked in dirt, but in trying to brush it away she brushed down to her ribcage.

“That’s all she’s got now, dirt and bones. You’ll want to be careful.”

“You didn’t tell me she’d be like this.”

“You’d rather her dead?”

Mim clapped her hands over Gayla’s ears. “No, of course not.” she hissed. “What’s wrong with you?”

Baba Yo shrugged. “Is not an exact science. But it works.”

She supposed so. But it was still disconcerting. She knelt down and cupped her daughter’s face. The dirt was loose, and she could feel some of it come away in her hands. She didn’t have eyes, not even the spark of something that could be eyes. Mim wondered for a moment if she should brush some of it away, find the eyesockets to give her daughter some semblance of a face, but decided against it. For now.

“Gayla? Gayla, sweetie, can you hear me?”

“Yeah…” her voice was distant, unfocused.

“It takes a little while to adjust.” Mookie said gently. “It’s like waking up in the middle of a dream, she has to figure out which world she’s in.”

“How long?”

Mookie shrugged. “It took me a few days. It might take her a bit longer, it’s easier if you were buried intact.”

“Bah, she’s a kid. She’ll bounce back soon enough.” Baba Yo waved a hand dismissively, and began to limp home without further comment. Mookie watched her go.

“Forgive her. She’s never been good with people.”

“You said it took you a few days…”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean?”

Mookie laughed, and shook her head. Her grassy mane swished and rustled around her head. “I meant exactly what you think I meant.” She pressed a hand to her chest, and pulled slowly. A thick clump of grass came away, dirt clinging to its roots. She shook it gently, then reached over and twisted a small hole into the soil of Gayla’s skull, where she carefully planted it. “Baba picked a good patch of ground. Better than mine even. But she didn’t know as much then. You can grow just about anything in this.”

“What about-” Mim swallowed, a little shaken. But she ran her fingers gently through her daughter’s grass. “What about the eyes?”

At this, Mookie reached into her skull and plucked one out. She held it to Mim. “Glass. I can send you to my dealer. You find ways to work around it. People don’t bother much with questions out here anyways.” She slipped the eye back into her socket.

Hesitantly, Mim reached out and put her hand on Mookie’s forearm. The grass was soft and cool. “Thank you. I… I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful before, I just. Make sure she knows? Please?”

“You could come back to the house, and tell her yourself.”

“I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

“Nonsense. She’ll be more upset if you don’t.”

Mim rose to her feet, and took her daughter’s hand. It was just cold dirt and bones, but it squeezed back. It was all she’d hoped for.

“Come on sweetie.” she said quietly. “Let’s go say hi to the witch.”


End file.
